Real Weddings, Advice, & Inspiration

Catalyst Wedding Company highlights weddings by and for game-changers. We seek to amplify and empower voices and viewpoints that are usually missing from the Wedding Industrial Complex. We're a community of badass wedding professionals who love all things funky, fresh, diverse, unique, and personality-driven; we convene twice yearly for (un)convention, a collaborative workshop, styled shoot, and dinner party. We're also the publishers of Catalyst Wedding Mag, a resource for couples looking for inspiration and affirmation that doing things differently in wedding-world is not only ok, it's wonderful!

Welcome back to The Official Bachelor Blog of Trump’s America, where facts aren’t real and love exists only to serve capitalism.

This episode begins with Raven insinuating that Nick delivered her first big-girl orgasm, but I refuse to believe it. If Corinne is the Donald Trump of this season, Raven is indubitably the Sean Spicer. She lies to America’s face about Nick’s sexual capabilities and thus follows a montage of her traipsing and skipping through the glacial plains of Finland, as a fully-grown, freshly-gasmed woman often does.

Next up is Rachel’s date, and it’s bittersweet because we all know what’s going to happen. They cuddle, kiss, nap presumably, and when Rachel tells Nick that he’s rare, he responds “I may be white but I’m still a minority.” All cute stuff.

She tells him she’s falling for him, but ultimately Nick knows the ACLU will need all the lawyers they can get in the upcoming trash months so he sends Rachel back to the Mother Land with a single mandate: save us all.

And I’m sure she will — right after she finds a love of her own on national television next season. Or perhaps WHILE she finds love on national television. After all, look at the work Teen Vogue is doing, not to mention the Twitter account @WeRateDogs™. In a country run by idiots and villains, the revolution lives in unexpected places. There’s no reason one of those places can’t be ABC on Monday at 8pm EST.

Vanessa’s sleepover is next. Nick invites her to run back and forth from an outdoor ice pool to an indoor sauna for an hour, and Italian nonnas everywhere are screaming, “YOU’RE GONNA KILL HER, ARE YA CRAZY.” But Vanessa, to whom Nick and the producers are needlessly cruel, isn’t giving up so easily. When they finally take a minute to bop around in a hot tub, they have a conversation entirely in code.

Nick tells Vanessa she’s “traditional,” and Vanessa is like “… yes?” and Nick is like, “I’m so not traditional,” and it’s around this time that I start to suspect Nick does not, in fact, understand what that word means. Of course, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest we live in a post-meaning world, so maybe I’m being old-fashioned, but it is hard to emotionally anchor yourself in a conversation where nothing means anything.

A few theories: Nick could be using the term “traditional” to describe the way in which Vanessa eats Sunday dinners with her family every week. But that wouldn’t explain why he looks so goddamn sly the whole time. And you’re not allowed to be on this show unless you’re willing to at least lie and say your family is the most important thing in your life.

So let’s move on to my second theory: Nick is using the word “traditional” to get Vanessa to admit whether or not she’ll engage in premarital love-making with him. If this is the case, Vanessa deftly refuses to acknowledge his question. This is the more likely scenario, but still — The Bachelor usually encourages its contestants to talk about their pre-Nick sex lives, especially if it fits a narrative of “I’m saving myself for the man who will own me after I’m transferred from my father’s possession.”

“I’m proud to be an American,” says Nick, even though nationalism is the foremost ingredient of fascism.

Maybe there is no explanation for what they’re saying. Maybe — and this is my favorite theory — they’ve managed to get some time away from the cameras to develop a code where words and inflections like “core values” and “core values” and “core values” all mean different things.

Anyway, most of what both of them are saying goes far above my head, including when Nick refuses to admit that Canada is objectively a better, kinder, less stupid country than America.

“I’m proud to be an American,” says Nick, even though nationalism is the foremost ingredient of fascism. Here is a beautiful Canadian, sitting in front of Nick, offering to share her Canadian citizenship with him until the day they both die. One day, Nick will watch someone he loves die from a curable disease because they couldn’t afford health insurance and hopefully that moment will at least complicate his American pride.

Or maybe he will blame the whole thing on immigrants. It’s hard to say anymore.

Anyway, congratulations to Raven and Vanessa, both of whom move on to the final round. May Nick take you far from the Arctic Circle this week.

Photo Courtesy of ABC

At this point, we make a swift U-Turn into part two of this week’s show: Women. Tell. All.

Nick kicks off the Women Tell All with a tour of his biggest fans’ watch parties. There are hundreds and hundreds of teenage girls, a few dads, and four Backstreet Boys. I hope one of the Backstreet Boys is the next Bachelor. Anything can happen in Trump’s America.

A few highlights of the Women Tell All:

Elizabeth, a woman who I cannot prove was actually on the show, tells Corinne that she could be a “slob-kebab” at times and who can disagree with that? No one. In fact, it’s the best summation of Corinne’s six-week run on the show.

Chris Harrison then tries to drag Liz the doula for her crimes of passion but the ladies aren’t having it. After Liz launches into repeated digressions about how people should love people for people’s present, not their past or future, the 25 women demonstrate heretofore unseen solidarity. Liz builds orphanages, they scream at Chris Harrison, and Chris knows enough to leave it at that. They’ve been infected by the revolutionary spirit of tomorrow’s Day Without a Woman and spend most of the rest of the show defending one another from Harrison’s gently-delivered accusations.

Except for Corinne and Taylor who should both star in their own episode of Planet Earth.

Poor Taylor. She means well but comes off like the protagonist of an anti-feminist propaganda film. It must be awful to have an enemy who is so much more fun than you. “Being fun” is a weapon that human beings have used against each other since the beginning of time, and it’s more powerful than any of us give it credit for. Taylor shames Corinne for shaming Taylor for “caring about mentally ill people,” which to my knowledge, never happened and isn’t a thing people do.

Did I miss something? Are mental health counselors a protected class now?

“You dumb-ass,” I can’t imagine anyone saying. “Why do you care about these mentally ill people anyway?? You weird, kind bitch!”

(Meant to be read in the voice of a 1950s Hollywood star).

Whitney, a pilates instructor, is like “You’re both condescending in your own way,” and it’s the best mental health counseling that has gone on all night.

Anyway, there’s an extremely long back and forth about the rules of napping and who violated them during the season, and then Corinne and Taylor come to a tenuous peace, and suddenly that part of our life is over.

Kristina takes the hot seat next, and Chris Harrison tells her he doesn’t know a single person who didn’t cry when they watched the episode where Nick broke up with her, which raises several questions about Chris Harrison’s social circle. Then Nick shows up and gets reamed for a lack of empathy, Liz the doula tries to ruin this show for everyone with her feminism, and Rachel emerges to say, “You are all welcome in advance, for I will deliver you from yourselves, from your country, from the silly little lives you think you’re running.”

Join us next week to see if Nick stops being a dumb fuck and takes Vanessa up on her all-too-generous offer of a lifetime supply of Canadian citizenship.

Becky Scott is a writer based in New York who loves The Bachelor and is great at giving humorous advice.

That night, Rachel is like, Kenny why did you go back to Lee and leave me waiting in the helicopter for three minutes like a goddamn IDIOT, and Kenny was like, I had to let Lee know that God loves everyone, even racist elves, and he still has time to get into heaven. Rachel, and America, seemed to be sated by that response and Kenny was spared the chopping block—for now.

At the cocktail party, we meet for the first time two white men named, respectively, Adam and Matt. I had heard rumors of Matt’s existence on the show due to a friend who works at the newspaper in his hometown asking me every Tuesday whether he was still in the running and literally never once knowing who she was talking about or whether he was still on the show.

What is “husband material”? That depends on what you understand to be the husband’s purpose in a home. According to Mila Kunis, feminist of truly respectable proportions, a husband’s purpose (not to be confused with the classic film “A Dog’s Purpose") is to vacuum, change diapers, and pull a hairball out of a clogged sink with the baby strapped to his chest. In this respect, Mila and I are on the same level. One way we are not alike is I would have promptly disqualified Whaboom Lucas for repeatedly submerging his plastic babies’ head beneath the water in the germ-filled sink.

This season was hotly anticipated by critics and civilians alike because Rachel (drum roll, please) is the first black bachelorette. Critics wondered things like: Will Rachel’s ascendance finally force Chris Harrison to reckon with the violent misdeeds of his white ancestors? Will this season feature smart, insightful, relatable conversations about interracial dating? What could someone as beautiful and witty and successful as Rachel possibly have seen in Nick Viall?

Vanessa meets Nick in the woods to ride ponies, and he’s like, “This is a week that’s filled with mutual decisions,” even though it’s obviously not, and nobody should be more acutely aware of that than Nick “Always the Groom’s Competition, Never the Groom” Viall.

This episode picks back up in that Brooklyn hotel room, where Nick’s ex-TV girlfriend, Andi, is about to give him some tough, honest advice about loving himself. Nick, who slut-shamed Andi on her After-the Rose special by pretending to feel betrayed that she had lain ‘pon his dick when her heart was elsewhere, deserves no empathy. Andi is pulling off the moral equivalent of looking your bully in the eye and saying, “I’m sorry you hate yourself, but I love you and so does Jesus.”

Once upon a time, a gentleman caller asked my grandpa for my aunt's hand in marriage. Grandpa asked him what he thought about my aunt working after marriage, and the dude said he hadn't thought of it. My grandpa kindly redirected the frat boy to suggest that he might want to talk to my aunt more before he proposed to her.

Welcome back to The Bachelor, the show where four women risk it all by giving their home address to a near-stranger who might become their husband.This is the hometown episode, and it starts in Hoxie, Arkansas, which I can’t help but suspect is not actually Raven’s hometown or, really, anybody’s hometown.

I can now say with near certitude that Rachel Lindsay will debut next season as the franchise’s first black bachelorette. This is good news for obvious historical reasons but mainly because it means dearly beloved Rachel is not destined to spend her life with Slenderma — I mean, Nick. Congratulations, Rachel. We are all, literally, thrilled.

This episode starts with Taylor launching one last grenade against Corinne’s integrity. She undergoes a voodoo witchcraft ceremony in the hopes of upping her p0wn factor but it doesn’t work–for some people, there just isn’t any hope. Nick sends her to the left yet one more time when she shows up at their dinner, despite her attempt to convince him that Corinne is a narsty, fake betch.

Welcome back to The Bachelor, a show where one man navigates the rocky waters of romance against the backdrop of a crumbling nation state.

Before we begin, I want to bring to your attention to a tragic coincidence of which I have heretofore been ignorant: Waukesha, Wisconsin, Nick Viall’s Middle American hometown, is the very place where two pre-teenage girls were convicted of a gruesome murder attempt in the name of a scary monster called Slenderman.

Catalyst Wedding Co.

Catalyst Wedding Company highlights weddings by and for game-changers. We seek to amplify and empower voices and viewpoints that are usually missing from the Wedding Industrial Complex. We're a community of badass wedding professionals who love all things funky, fresh, diverse, unique, and personality-driven; we convene twice yearly for (un)convention, a collaborative workshop, styled shoot, and dinner party. We're also the publishers of Catalyst Wedding Mag, a resource for couples looking for inspiration and affirmation that doing things differently in wedding-world is not only ok, it's wonderful!

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